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senualothbrok · 5 months ago

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Revelation

Gif by @dolceaspidenera

Summary: Gale shows Aurora she has nothing to hide. Sequel to Progress and Promise.

"Wreathed in morning light, sitting astride you, her every blemish and bulge is on display. She is exposed. Doubt disturbs her gaze.

You must banish it.

“I want to see you, Aurora.”

You take hold of her hand, swirling your tongue across the pads of her fingers. “All of you. Just like this.”"

AO3 link

Word count: 3.8k

Disclaimers: NSFW. 18+. Smut. Gale x female OC (Aurora). Aurora is in recovery from an eating disorder/body dysmorphia.

More disclaimers: Body worship. Hand and finger kink. Woman on top/cowgirl. Vaginal fingering.

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When she rustles beside you, your hand darts out by instinct. Buried in your bedsheets, you hear faint shouts from the docks outside, the morning call of seagulls circling overhead. Aurora has always been one to rise early, much to your chagrin. You prefer to cling to the comforts and luxuries of the night. You reach for her, groaning into your pillow.

“Early,” you manage, as your fingers dance across her hip. “Stay.”

She laughs, a huff of affection. As she retreats, you open a sleep-blurred eye. She is shuffling speedily into her slip, her auburn hair spilling over her shoulders. Strokes of golden light linger on the contours of her face. Even after all this time, your breath still catches at the sight of her, here and yours. The space she has left beside you is an ache, whirling with her scent of lavender and rain. The fragrance of home.

“Come back to bed, Aurora,” you rasp.

She smiles, amused, forbearing. You mourn the cascade of white silk over her curves. Never before have you hated a piece of flimsy, spiteful fabric as much as you do now. You could disintegrate it with a thought, were it not for Aurora’s wishes. You yearn for the constellations of freckles below her breasts and navel, trembling beneath your touch.

“I need to get to the market, Gale. I want to get you those pastries you like. And I need to get some paints and ink.”

You grizzle, shifting onto your back. After the discoveries of last night - a secret mole on the innermost curve of her thigh, a snug spot that made her body sing - you cannot think of anything less appealing than leaving this bedroom. Not for a thousand ancient tomes would you trade such reveries. Not even for signed first editions.

“All that can wait.”

She is reaching for her robe, draped lazily on a chair beside your bed. Outside the paradise of your bedsheets, Aurora cannot bear to be naked. It saddens you, how difficult it still is for her, though your love burns in every caress of skin and tongue and soul. This goddess in all but name, the north star blazing in your blue-green sky. In your haze, it seems the greatest injustice to watch the covering of her perfect form, so recently bare and flushed against yours.

It will not do. No, you cannot bear it. You spring awake, your mind and body united in their purpose. With a crackle and flicker of your fingers, her robe whizzes into your grip. You draw yourself up against the headboard.

Aurora can be playful. You discovered it soon after she moved into your home. It was a delight, to step behind the veil of solemn reservation, to see the twinkle in those appraising eyes. There was the joy of novelty in her, too. She had never had the chance for mischief, under the yoke of illness and her mother’s cruelty. Now, she relishes the opportunity to tease and tickle, to nip at an earlobe or ghost over a nipple. To rise to the challenge of desire. You are almost certain she will play your game.

Her lips part in surprise for an instant. Then she frowns, an impression of disapproval. “Gale.”

There is something about the intensity of her furrowed brow that makes you want to grin. It is almost theatrical. Supremely endearing. You resist the urge, mirroring her frown instead.

“Oh.” You smooth out her robe in your lap, deliberate and measured. “Did you want this?”

“Gale.” Her tone is stern, but her gaze is tender. She bites her lip, a telltale sign that sparks through your thoughts and steels your resolve. Heat simmers beneath your skin, the thrumming arousal of half-sleep that swells. “Come now.”

You arch an eyebrow. “You come now.” You tap your thigh briskly. “Come here.”

She narrows her eyes, silver flashing in a grey sea. For a while she waits as you tilt your head, your lips curled in appraisal and expectation. She pulls at her slip, her arms hovering over her belly, a habit of concealing beauty she believes to be ugliness. A habit you are bent on helping her to break, even if it takes a lifetime.

The standoff does not last long. You knew it would not. With a sigh, she climbs onto the bed, grasping for the robe which you snatch away from her once, twice, three times. You are deft and quick, and she is small, and it is easy. She glares at you, shadow daggers without an edge.

“Come closer,” you drawl.

Her cheeks are dusted coral now. You laugh as she clambers onto your lap, her slip riding higher and higher up her thighs as she clutches for the prize that you suspend frustratingly beyond her reach. A shoulder strap falls, her lowered neckline dancing over the dark skin around her nipple. The trail of freckles between her collarbone and her cleavage is a torment, stirring your ever-present compulsion to follow where it leads. You linger on the peaks pressing through the silk that clings to her breasts, almost translucent as she jostles. There is a gathering within you, a tingling in your groin that is spreading into your core. Your growing hardness twitches against her as you wet your lips.

You feel her sharp breath, warm and sour-sweet, the tightening of her lean calves bracketing you. The gentle, subconscious roll of her hips as her eyelids flutter. You sense, once again, that she cannot resist you. Rare are the occasions when she tries. You only have to ask, and she will open to you, like the blooming bud of an unseen flower, kept in a vault to which only you have the key. She is yours, and always will be.

A jolt of desire, red and raw, pulses through you.

You fling her robe onto the floor. She does not move towards it. You seize your victory. A gasp escapes her as you press down on the velvet soft cheeks of her ass, her arms falling around your neck like an anchor. As she buckles forward, her thick waves form a curtain around your faces, streaked with faded light. She is everything, and there is nothing else but her.

Aurora is quiet. In the early days, your only guide to her arousal was the catching and quivering of her breath, the tensing of her flesh, the rippling of her features. Through pants and pauses, you learned the peaks and troughs of her pleasure, and in the discovery, found that she, too, was embarking on uncharted territory. Until you, Aurora’s only experience of intimacy was to mask herself with a Glamour, lying still and silent to perform a role she never asked to play. Before you, she had never known the topography of love and desire, the twining of mind, flesh and soul with another.

She had confessed, later, that you were the only one to have brought her to climax. She had never before felt that explosion of ecstasy - singular and earth-shattering, entirely alien. You remember the long, lilting moan that dripped from her, echoing the first taste of her release. And though you felt sorrow at her story, you swelled with pride. Yours is the only flesh to have joined the marvel of hers, naked and unglamoured, and brought her to bliss. If you could wear this as a badge of honour for the world to see, you would.

Yet at times there is still a hesitation in her. Not just a shyness, cemented by years of isolation, when her body was always a punishment and never a privilege. But a hint of shame. A deep-seated suspicion that you will turn away.

To have beheld Aurora in all her glory has transformed you. You could never turn away.

Your hungry mouth finds hers, open, wet and willing. You clutch and pull at the offensive fabric that stubbornly separates her skin from yours. Heinous, wretched thing. You could tear it off, rip it with your teeth. As her tongue glides against yours, she does not seem to notice your frenzy. Her delicate fingers weave into your hair, setting every fibre alight. She whimpers ever so softly as you lap and suck at the corner of her lip, her chin gleaming and moist with your spit, and all at once you are rock hard, possessed by the feel and smell and taste of her. You wrench and tug her slip upwards, drawing back slightly to whip it over her head.

Aurora pauses. Flushed and breathless, she looks down, and you know she is registering her position. She is not cloaked by your writhing limbs, or obscured beneath the bedsheets. Wreathed in morning light, sitting astride you, her every blemish and bulge is on display. She is exposed. Doubt disturbs her gaze.

You must banish it.

“I want to see you, Aurora.” You take hold of her hand, swirling your tongue across the pads of her fingers. “All of you. Just like this.”

She shivers. For emphasis, you press her hand firmly against your cock. It throbs, free from the constraints of clothing, seeking her like a beacon. Her touch is a surge of electricity, and you cannot stop the groan that spurts out of you. Her grey eyes are almost black, dilated with unmistakable longing.

“Please,” you whisper.

You would not ask if you thought she was unwilling. If you saw displeasure in her hesitation, and not a residual fear of rejection, an anticipation of disgust. And you must show her, again and again, that you could never respond to the miracle of her beauty with anything but the most all-consuming love. You will never stop showing her.

In the steepling of her brow, you sense a shift. The shell of trust and love peeking open. She arches backwards with the easy grace of a swan, and you are the lake beneath and around and within her. You peel her slip off with a slow and gentle reverence, your breathing stilted by awe. She closes her eyes, and you are entranced by the arc of her lifted arms, the web of her lashes, the starry patterns of her dappled skin. The sheen of desire adorning her mound.

She is, as always, a revelation.

“I love you.” Your voice is a prayer. “Every part of you.”

You do not let her hands fall to conceal the softness of her stomach, the stretchmarks around her hips and breasts. All the parts you cherish which she yearns to hide, dazzling stitches in the glorious tapestry of Aurora. Her eyes glimmer as you clasp her hands against the bristles of your beard, holding her fast. An eternal affirmation. A promise you will keep making until the end of your days.

You are safe. You are seen. You are loved.

Her eyes widen as you push your tangled bodies away from the headboard. Raised halfway on her knees, she steadies herself on your shoulders, as though balanced on a tightrope, with only you to keep her from falling. Every muscle within you clenches with a building ache as you bend upwards to clasp her close. You run your tongue from the nook behind her earlobe to the heave of her breast, swirling a circle around her nipple.

“I love this part,” you murmur, sucking at the hardened bud.

Her breath seizes, arousal thrusting against uncertainty. As she tilts forward, you lean back on an elbow to savour the gift of this moment - the fullness of Aurora bare and naked before you, the undeniable quiver of faith, hope and love that vibrates through her flawless form. You circle one arm around the small of her back, and the warmth of her hands gliding up your neck and into your hair sends a spasm through your gut. When your tongue catches the salt around her navel, sweeping over each mole and freckle on her midriff, she stiffens. But you trust.

“I love this part,” you repeat.

You plant wet, starving kisses on the dimples of her belly, dark corners which Aurora so fears to tread. She tenses with apprehension, hanging back slightly. You look up at her, open mouthed, your tongue still flickering from its feast before. You hold her gaze as your fingers snake over her hip bone, through her damp wiry down, to her molten core. Her folds are hot and slick, her clit smooth as a nectar-coated petal. She shudders, toppling back into you as you find it, sending a pulse from the tips of your toes through the deepest recesses of your balls.

“And this part,” you groan into her skin.

You can smell the salt tang of her desire now, and it is intoxicating. You hum, half-drunk, as you lap at the curves of her waist, tracing swift whirls around her fire with your lithe and expert fingers. With them, you can summon the mightiest storm, reduce enemies to dust. You can raise up and tear down. But no spell could ever come close to this most masterful of skills, reserved for her alone.

She lets out a whine, short and needy - that precious signal, the spark which stokes the raging fires within you. You cannot hold it any longer. You grab her hand in your slick-soaked fingers and wrap it around your cock. You are fully erect, veins throbbing, a desperate bead leaking from your tip. In her slender fingers, you are a giant, growing stiffer by the second. You are invincible.

If she had any reservations about her effect on you, there can be surely no doubt now. In this moment, there is nothing you want more. You are nothing more than an all-consuming ache for her. She looks at you half-lidded, a gossamer string of saliva trickling from her parted, plump lips.

“Yes,” she pleads.

You are panting as you guide her hand, aligning your length against the dew of her entrance. She lowers herself onto you so delicately that you feel like clay in a sculptor’s hands. Her walls are so smooth, so tight, against the head of your cock, and the pleasure is so piercing that your elbow buckles under you as you writhe. She falls forward, her arms trembling on either side of your head, her tongue a helpless flurry inside, outside, around your eager mouth. The mattress shivers beneath you. You see how her mind narrows to a pinpoint, drifting from the flaws she imagines and longs to hide. You feel the grinding of her hips, inviting you deeper inside her. Every sign of her unravelling snaps a frayed nerve inside you.

“Yes, my love,” you manage. “Take your pleasure.”

She withdraws a little, confusion flitting across her features. A fleeting awkwardness. You remember that this is not a position Aurora is accustomed to, nor is the control and rapture that comes from it. All at once, you are gripped by a singular determination. You will show her, or help her learn herself. You will help her reclaim what has been lost to her, all these long and lonely years, before her comet blazed into your world.

You lean upwards, your hands resuming their placement on her ass. She stares, wide-eyed, unsure. You send your thoughts out to her - trust me - and her lips ease into a faint, halting smile. You finally understand the purpose of all those meaningless dalliances of your youth, when you fumbled over and finessed the techniques of love. They were all for her. All for this.

You draw your knees up and shift your pelvis. You feel for the swollen pearl of her clit against the top of your shaft. You have memorised its contours well, so well you could seek it out blind. Aurora is your favourite topic of study, a masterpiece you will never stop unveiling. And between the sheets, this gem is her centre. When you find it, you angle yourself so every surge of your cock will grind against it. She sucks in a breath, and you smile at the confirmation.

“Does this feel good?”

As you thrust up into her, you push her hips down to swallow your length. A blush flares on Aurora’s cheeks, deep as the pink of her folds. You grit your teeth through the compulsion that engorges you, the tremors of need through your muscles. On the third stroke, she bites her lip and rolls her eyes back as she takes your fullness inside her.

Gods, you think to yourself. You cannot hold on much longer. One moan, one whimper, one gasp as she arches back, and you could let go and fall off the edge.

You remind yourself that you must not. You must hold on for her.

“Take your pleasure, Aurora,” you rasp.

She moves slowly, tentatively, chasing after the movement you have set. You cup her breasts as they sway, pinching gently at her nipples, thumbing at the freckles nestled within their smooth, silky undersides. Rapt and voracious, you watch for signs of growing tension seeking release. A wrinkle appears between her eyebrows, the mark of laboured concentration. The drag of your cock inside her is an ache that rubs you raw. But there is a faltering in her rhythm as she rises and falls, a frown that betrays her mounting anxiety.

You realise, with horror, that she has slipped into a performance, and she feels she is failing.

She stops. “I'm sorry.” She looks away. “I'm not very good at this. I'm not sure-”

You lurch upwards to catch her words with your mouth. You speak your reassurance through the tender dance of tongues, the shield of your arms around her. You are furious with yourself, incandescent, to have put herself in this position. To have made her feel that she could do anything to let you down. It is unconscionable.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, moving back. “I didn’t mean-”

She cuts you off with an embrace. The force of it winds you. Aurora is small, but she is not weak. Her resolution has a firmness that has always stilled you. She nuzzles into your hair and neck, sealing tiny kisses along your Adam's apple. She soaks you in, and you are buoyed by the strength of her love, pure and unwavering.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.”

You cannot ignore the sincerity in her voice. Her love is larger than your anger, greater than any foolish mistake you could make. Before her altar, you lay down the burdens of blame. You press your lips to her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks. You had wondered if it was all too much for her, if you should stop. But her fingers are ghosting over the base of your cock, and her mouth is almost greedy when she tilts your chin down to taste your moan.

“What feels good?” you ask, when you pull apart to breathe.

She struggles to answer. The question is a continual discovery, its waypoints not formed from words. But you know some of them already. You can remind her.

“Does this feel good?”

You brush your lips across her fingers, widening your mouth as you take two, then three, into your wet warmth. You swirl your practised tongue into the space between them, sucking one in softly, the other more firmly. Her gaze darkens, the edge of her thumbnail bearing against your beard as it glistens with your spit.

You are wizards. It was not a surprise to discover your mutual love of fingers, those graceful channels of power and wonder. She had been surprised, at first, to find out all the secret spells they could cast. Her clear delight filled you with a fervent satisfaction. You know, as you press your fingers into her open mouth, that this will drive her wild.

Her eyes wrench closed as her tongue glides down the length of your index finger, weaving and winding across, desperate for more. The shine of saliva on her chin mirrors the moisture that streams over your spasming cock as she licks and sucks with increasing hunger, whining as you plunge her digits deeper into your mouth. As you savour every inch and groove of her, your thoughts slow to a trickle. You are coming undone.

She begins to rock, echoing the rhythm of your fingers. The flame of her desire burns over in tiny oscillations of her hips that shudder through your girth. Wider and stronger they grow, following the fierce current that takes hold of her, banishing all thought and doubt. You keen, her walls tightening and clenching as she flinches, the top of your shaft aching from the bulge of her clit and the friction that mounts as she rolls faster and faster into you. Her whimper rumbles through the pads of your fingers, and you hear the slick, heavy sounds of her arousal everywhere at once.

“Gale.” Her voice is torn with need and pleasure. “That feels so good.’

Her words are a spell. A door swings open inside you, breaking from its hinges. She senses it. Your hips snap of their own accord, thrusting to her quickening pace. All the love and lust within you gathers into the power between your legs, a roiling river ready to burst its banks. You gulp and suck, your teeth catching on her knuckles, your fingers pressing down on her flurrying tongue. She shakes as her wetness convulses around your surging cock, the twitching urgency of climax pulling her off the precipice. You gasp out a muffled cry, clinging to the last vestiges of the dam inside you as they splinter, one by one. She throws her head back and cries out your name.

You explode inside her. It is a shattering of every sensation that you have ever felt, an unleashing of yourself in bursts of blinding ecstasy. You spasm against her, a chaos of incoherent murmurs through the aftershocks of bliss. Your chest heaves, your vision fogs, your skin tingles against hers. And when your eyes meet again, a haze of awe and wonder cocoons you.

There are many things you want to say as you lie beside her. Her gaze is bright and gentle as sunlight on snow, her tousled hair a waterfall winding through your heart. You want to tell her that you love her with the fire of a thousand suns. That no night sky or grand illusion could ever hold a candle to her beauty. That she is your beginning and your end, and every instant with her is the most magical of revelations. But you do not.

It is her moment. Her milestone. You sense the memories that ebb and flow within her, the tide of your love washing over her wounds. You listen to the lilt of her breathing, the swell of the sea, the drum of your heartbeat. Her robe and slip lie discarded on the floor as the morning wears on. You trace the footsteps of her freckles, while she maps out the drifting down on your skin.

“I think I could do that again,” she says finally. Her smile is light with mischief.

You grin as she melts into your arms.

-----

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sseanettles · 2 months ago

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nothing grows in corpses (in the earth of me)

dream x hob gadling | mature | Finally cross-posting my take on the fandom classic of the show progresses as the comics do, even to The Wake. Until Death resurrects Morpheus and forces the choice of "redemption" upon him instead of suicide. It goes...horribly. No good. Very bad. Instead of learning the lesson, Morpheus (in his infinite wisdom) opts instead for a highly effective existence strike until one day Hob Gadling stumbles upon his ghastly handiwork and immediately decides that this just won't do. Man Who Refuses To Die vs. Man Who Refuses To Live: fight.

Dead Dove, Do Not Eat for the following: graphic depictions of starvation, illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, blood and gore, loss of autonomy, etc. etc. This is some classic old world whump, folks! But I promise it's also supremely healing in the end.

Prologue: euclid | 6.7 k | AO3 link | next part

(or: the one where Death attends a second wake. and a ren faire.)

Death was fractionated as she always was, as every Endless always was. She was, true to function and form, multitudinously singular. Wherever she went, she was always her: this plane’s one and only Death. But death was also always everywhere, and so, too, was she.

Right now, she walked the Earth, set to take near 200,000 hands in her own this day. Whether in fight, panic, relief, the hands always came, and they always took hold. And she would accept them—the kind, clawing, despairing, and furious alike—with a gentle smile and the beat of mighty wings.

She was also searching the Sunless Lands at an easy stroll, peering through that which only the dead had borne witness to for a particular shade of one who once was. She searched and searched, her cadence light, her black-painted lips curved in an absent, toothless smile. Amid the What-Comes-Next she walked, and she walked alone.

She was also meandering through a Renaissance Faire in North Carolina, and she picked her way around puddles and through mud with her silver-gray skirts gathered in her hands and her hair shielded from the rain by her silken habit. Around her, people laughed and squealed; they ducked for cover where they could find it, and others still tipped their faces to the sky with arms spread wide in drunken delight and irreverent celebration, none the wiser to her passing.

She was also standing upon carefully reconstructed Grecian cliffs in her standard fare of silver Ankh, black pants, and black tank top, letting the ocean air tug at her unbound hair and closing her ink-lined eyes as she basked in the Dreaming’s setting sun. Her boots hung from her hands at her sides, stuffed with her socks, and her toes buried into the still-warm earth as she yearned for the pale sand far below.

Everywhere she was, she would not be alone for long.

The Death at the Renaissance Faire found her someone first.

She skirted the beer tent in favor of the rain, where four men, rivaling bears in their size and hairiness, serenaded the crowd that had assembled within the canvas walls to escape the brief turn in weather. In both vocal and mandolin skill, they were loud, raucous, off-tune—passionately inebriated, horribly accented, and so cheaply stylized to the point of butchery for all their efforts at “realism.” It was all good fun, and entertainment enough, at least to those who had no experience of true minstrels.

Or to an American.

Her intended drinking mate, holed away within the dilapidated remains of a permanent set piece that only loosely resembled a “Ye Olde” public house, was decidedly not one of those small-worlded people. And he certainly wasn’t American.

She eased the door open carefully. The wood was heavy in her hands, poorly hung on the hinges; it groaned like a dying breath beneath her touch, and she took care to heft it up a bit to ease its passing as she shut it after herself. She cast a careful eye on the ceiling. The old, exposed beams and thatched roof raised tall from planked floors that were half straw and dirt either from neglect or “authentic” design choice. She wasn’t entirely sure which was to blame, but regardless it presented a less than stable foundation for a frighteningly sturdy building of wood and stone. A brick house built upon toothpicks, as it were.

No wonder it had been condemned so soon. It was the most authentic thing at this faire and, as followed, the most dangerous.

Save for the man seated upon a bench at one of the equally long, rough-hewn tables.

Few existed that could rival him in authenticity, and Mad Hettie certainly didn’t share his proficiency in violence. For while both pen and sword held power in his hand, over the centuries, in spite of conscience, he had always tended for the latter. It was always easier, after all, to do harm. Frequently, it paid better, and it certainly paid faster even if, in the long run, all you were doing was cutting off the nose to spite the face.

It was a lesson, it seemed, that he had begun to take to heart in the dawning of the twenty-first century.

Death smiled softly, yet unseen in the shadowed gloom of the threshold. He was a history teacher this time, she knew. It was glamourless, certainly not well-paying, frequently thankless, and under near-constant assault from powerful people trying to slake their ever-greater, bottomless greed by erasing the truth of their cruelty from memory and forging the path for its continuance in the process.

Greed for money. Influence. Power. Status. Subjugation.

The blinding of the masses in favor of self-gain.

She thought of his knighted years. She thought of hands she had taken beneath the Atlantic, knowing full well who caused their drowning. She thought of him in 1989 even, arriving with phone and car at hand, ready to show off to her brother how far mankind had come and the status he had maintained, albeit in a (somewhat) less showy and far less blood-bathed manner.

This, now, was a start.

The furrows in the dusty, hard-packed earth surrounding the hearth betrayed how he had dragged his present set-up into place. Had the fireplace been lit, he would’ve been backed by the flames, warmed by their blaze and saturated by smoke in short turn. Instead, he sat in cold, damp darkness. He had grown his beard back out, not quite as full as it had been when they had first met in 1389 but certainly not the carefully manicured thing of the 1500s either. His hair was still on the longer side, just beyond what it had been that day in the New Inn. It filled out and hung in his face with a weathered, wavy gentleness—brought to life in a manner that it hadn’t been since the fourteenth century by the storming Eastern seaboard humidity.

He sat there, as he had in the White Horse six centuries past: back stooped, elbows on the table, and a tankard of pitiful beer gripped in his hands. And though he had obviously not aged in body since that first meeting, there was something bone-tired in the dark beneath his eyes, something uncharacteristically bitter in the press of his mouth and grim in the set of his jaw. The gray at his temples caught the light of the fake gas lantern lit beside him and shone like bone. The casted shadows made him seem gaunter at the cheeks than she knew he was.

He looked ill-rested.

Butter scraped over too much bread.

She knocked gently on one of the massive pillar beams, partially rotted with termite, and stepped from the blackest part of the dark.

“Hi,” she smiled.

Hob Gadling looked up from the depths of his drink in a flash of vigilance, picking her out in the gloom at the edge of the room with a mercenary’s speed. Even through his morose buzz, he seemed on guard.

Her smile, in turn, only broadened to its normal brightness.

“D’you mind if I join you?” she asked and pointed to the empty length of bench beside him.

He took her in, head to toe. His expression grew a touch dourer, voice turning petulant along with it. “You don’t sing, do you?”

The boisterously bad performance outside carried to them still. She gave a huff of a laugh.

“To myself, sometimes,” she admitted but then added with a knowing eye, “not in public.”

Hob’s guardedness faded in a flash melt to a lopsided-grin, and he hoisted his drink in slipshod salute.

“Well, come over here, then!” he cheered. “Have a drink!”

The woman’s eyes crinkled as her lips curved shut in a sunny yet toothless smile that secretly said she knew more than he did. And as he watched her approach, a shiver passed down his spine. He blamed it on the weather and his very, very, very old bones.

“ ‘S okay,” he continued as she settled beside him in the opposite direction, facing the hearth, and adjusted her skirts and habit. “I’m not gonna bite, ‘specially not a woman of God.”

She only stared at him, still smiling like that, and he felt the need to fill the silence between them creep upon him like a shadow. His words spilled like his drink, messy and with a heavy, defensive disdain that felt all the more ill-sitting in the face of her…well, her everything.

“Just a little bit tiddly, that’s all…an’ hardly even that, really,” he said and knocked the tankard so that its offensive insides sloshed. “I don’t know if it’s this piss beer or the mood I’m in, but I’m getting no drunker for all that I’ve been drinking.”

He took a quick draft of said piss beer for the sake of busying his hands and then passed it off to her. She was far too still, far too quiet to be a Faire-goer despite her dress, and he was beginning to feel the need to bring up the fact that he had a girlfriend, a very grand girlfriend as it were actually, and that her name was Gwen and that she was here as a vendor and so had a whole grounds full of people to back her up if she tried anything improper. Kind of like crossing a carnie in a circus: not a good idea if she wanted to live out the day.

But then he watched the strange woman in her silver-gray Holy attire, with her dark skin barely marked by the rain, take a long drink of his horrible beer with unflinching, mischievous serenity. And he found that he somehow knew there was no need for protestations or grandstanding. She was not here to cause trouble any more than he. After all, how else did you end up holed away together in a condemned building, alone, in the midst of a whole fucking production like this? While dressed up, he might add; him, it made sense. He was wearing a Spirit Halloween peasant costume with jeans and his work boots underneath, for crying out loud, and the former was only at Gwen’s adamant protestations that he “make even a little bit of effort, Robbie, come on!”

Clearly, he didn’t want to be here. But her….

Well, if he didn’t know better, he’d say her outfit was authentic fourteenth century.

“So,” he began as she passed the beer back to him. “You don’t sing. You don’t partake in the beer tent. You won’t watch the entertainment, and your accent’s too…” He squinted at her, trying to find the right word and finally settling on an approximate. “Real. ‘S not quite English, but ‘s not American either.”

The Stranger’s smile only deepened, flashing teeth, and she glanced to her lap as she laced her hands atop her thighs.

“ ‘S more like something from…” He trailed off and scoffed at himself for what he was about to say. “Well, a long time ago.”

He stopped. Just like her outfit, if he hadn’t known better, he would’ve said her accent was authentic fourteenth century, too.

He regarded her with a calculating eye.

A long silence fell over the hollow pub; she held his gaze for every agonizing second of it, patient in her waiting. Her smile had begun to fade at some point, and all that remained now was a faint Mona Lisa of an expression that was so, so familiar in a heart-aching sort of way. Her beautiful eyes glittered, as bottomless as night skies and as dark as grave earth.

Again, Hob felt the shiver. The Faire suddenly sounded very, very far away, and it vanished altogether as he summoned forth a dialect that he had not spoken in six centuries and asked the only question that mattered.

“You’re not here with the festival, are you?”

The Stranger shook her head and said in the same, long-dead tongue,

“Not really.”

Hob nodded for his turn and swallowed with a mouth and gullet that had suddenly become quite dry. He took another drink of the truly shitty beer with pale-knuckled hands and tried not to choke.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said as he cleared his throat after the hurried gulp. “Haven’t I?”

“Many times,” the Stranger beside him said, “yes.”

Hob barely kept his nervous giggle from bursting out of him and instead deflected it into a quick smirk and equally fast barb as he lapsed once more into his modern fare of language.

“You’ve got to be a real heartbreaker, then.”

She smiled, laughed; it was a small, final sort of sound that only worsened his unease. His hands fidgeted around the tankard in an attempt to find somewhere to go and something to do and came up short.

“Well, don’t tell me,” he heard himself saying with his usual, rakish smile, once again trying to fill her void even as he got sucked into memorizing every little sensory detail of existence around him. “I’ll remember in a minute. Never forget a face, me. Ach, no, that’s bollocks.” He ran a hand over his cringing face. The limb trembled finely, and he passed it off with a run of his fingers through his hair. God’s wounds, this humidity was doing a number on it; the tangles at the end of the day were going to be atrocious.

The woman continued to watch him, faintly amused and endlessly patient.

“I’ve forgotten more faces than…” He blew out a long breath, cheeks puffing with it, as he truly thought on that number and briefly marveled. His eyes flicked back to hers, and he struggled once again to pass this off as a normal interaction. “I’m surprised I’d forget yours though.”

Still that mystic smile. It was driving him mad.

“You’ll remember,” she teased and leaned back against the table, propping her elbows along the edge. She began to draw patterns in the dust with her soft-shoed toe. “So, how are you enjoying the Faire?”

Hob snorted, inwardly so very desperately relieved for the change in conversation. This he could fall back on, like a well-worn crutch, like comfortable armor: pure disdain.

“I feel like Billy the Kid would have felt at a South London Wild West Show,” he retorted mulishly. “It’s like chewing on silver foil. ‘Orrible. I dunno what Gwen sees in it.” He took another drink from a tankard that certainly should have run dry by now—how was there still more to drink? “This isn’t history, it’s not the past. It’s a moldering great lump of now,” he slammed a hand on the table, his mouth filled with bitter.

He found he couldn’t quite look at the woman next to him.

“That’s what I think,” he finished sullenly. “What do you think?”

If he had been able to bring himself to look at his strange bedfellow, he would have seen that her eyes seemed sad.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she said after a moment. She was a touch defiant, a touch like Hob himself during his lectures to his more jaded students who were already prepared to write off humanity in the span of their own blisteringly young lifetimes. “All the different kinds of people here…the ones who like dressing up and the singers and the craftsmen and the street theater, and all the different types of people who come to see it and have a great day out—they’re all having a marvelous time.” She took the tankard from him this time of her own accord, drawing his eyes back to hers as she did, and took a pointed, long drink with an accompanying, pointed stare, before setting it back between his hands. “It’s great.”

He grumbled and attempted to bury himself once more in his cup. He hadn’t liked that turnabout; hadn’t liked the way she sounded so like him, like how he should have sounded. It rankled him, set his skin crawling and his gut twisting.

“Well, thank you, little miss sunshine,” he muttered, taking a gulp of his own. “And I suppose it doesn’t bother you that the past was never like this?” He looked past her, between them, as he spoke, but never right at her. Her own gaze never left his eyes. “Nah. Why should it? You weren’t there. What do you care?”

She let his scathing, overly personal rant fall flat between them in the straw and dust, like the patient parent waiting out her toddler as he stamped his feet in a pout, and watched for that moment of quiet amid the petulance when he had released some of his discomfort and was ready to hear what she had to say. She shifted so that she could angle herself a little more toward him, keeping her posture relaxed and open as she drew one leg up onto the bench with her and leaned further into the table.

A kind word, a friendly face.

“I do care,” she corrected, without anger, without judgement. “But right now, I care more about why the man who once marveled at chimneys and playing cards and handkerchiefs and waxed poetic about them to the King of Dreams himself is now so bitter over joy.”

Hob had felt his heart stop a great many times in his long life. Had felt it give out over and over again as his lungs took on more water than air, had felt it stutter to an end as his blood flowed into the earth across half of Europe instead of through his veins, had felt it break apart as what was once his home crushed down on him with Jim’s hand not but an inch away, limp in the rubble of the Blitz. He was intimately familiar with the heart’s stop.

For a few seconds, he felt it again now.

He had gone very still, pale even in the dim light of the lamp. He scarcely dared to breathe or even blink, and as his heart once more began to beat, he forced himself to swallow. Forced his throat to work, to recall speaking and how it was performed. He did not yet dare move his body; he was the mouse frozen before the snake’s strike, hoping against hope that it was not yet seen but knowing in truth that the end was nigh.

Anything for a few seconds more.

“…How do you know about that?” he rasped.

“Because I was there, Hob Gadling,” Death replied. “I remember.”

And just like that, The New Stranger caught upon his memory, like a match sparking off the striker without quite yet fully igniting. His hands, pressed flat to the table with sweating palms, curled into slow fists. His voice firmed, and he struck the match again in a try for flame.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“You know me,” was all she said. Her ineffable smile grew a touch sad. “You were a friend of my brother’s.”

The match caught fire.

Hob let out a strangled sigh as finally, finally he saw her face…her dress, her smile. All of it had been companion to a figure who loomed so much larger within his memory, but it was there all the same.

Authentic had been right.

“You were at the pub,” he began, pointing at her, and hated the wobble that entered the lowest register of his voice, “that first day.”

For a while, Death only watched him, still vaguely sad, and then gave her quiet confirmation.

“You used to meet him for a drink. Once a century on that day.”

Hob released the rest of his sigh, hand falling, and the wobble reached the tipping point mid-exhale—like one of those metal spin tops entering its final careening rotation before it spun out along the table. His teeth clamped shut on the resulting sound, snapped bone on bone like a dog’s jaw, and he glared into his tankard in the strangled silence. His unblinking eyes glittered with a stubbornness Death dearly missed as he dared the shine there to break free, to strike the table and his deceptively unblemished hands.

Neither of them said anything for a long, long time, and upon Grecian cliffs in the Dreaming, Death watched as a figure in flowing white made his way along the elephant paths through the ice plants and their fuchsia blossoms toward her lookout. She waved to him in large, exaggerated swoops and then laughed as he paused, tilted his head in that ponderous, nonplussed way of his, and only continued onward once she stopped.

“Were a friend,” Hob Gadling finally echoed. He sniffed once, as stiffly as he’d spoken, and clenched his hands until his knuckles shone to keep from dashing them across his nose and eyes. “Used to meet.”

The moody bitterness to which he had clung so desperately so far buckled beneath the weight of grief. He sank the edge of his teeth into the inside of his cheek and worked his jaw until an iron flash hit his tongue. He took in a shaking, bracing breath, and when he met Death’s eyes, his own were no longer as bright. A pair of small track lines crept their way across his dusty skin, traveling in opposing tandem down the backs of his hands and leaving only clean skin in their wake.

“It’s true, then,” he said. “That dream, back in January…he is dead.”

“Yes,” Death replied.

Hob nodded, too quick, too certain. He stared into the middling space of nowhere between them as he turned her single syllable reply over and over in his mind and tried to allow its vast reality to sink into him and lay to rest within his bones.

He is dead.

Hob knew the scope of that answer well. Understood it so deeply that it had fueled six hundred years of decision-making and running all to avoid it for himself at any cost.

Dead meant gone. Lost. Finished. Over.

Ended.

He had internalized this reality for so many. He had processed it for spouses and partners and friends and enemies alike—after all, for one as long lived as himself, enemies were a kind of comforting constant in and of themselves. It had required some grieving for them all, had taken funerals, memorials, and time, but he had processed it.

So why, ten months down the line, was he still having such a hard time reconciling the concept of ended with Him?

He thought of star-blue eyes with pupils that glittered with galaxies when the candlelight struck them at just the right angle. He thought of a voice as deep as the sea and as measured as time in its speaking, of skin as pale as moonlight, of features so sharp-boned he at one time thought they could only be of the fae. How could someone—how could something—like that end? It was antithetical. It was fundamentally inconceivable, incompatible! It was….

He swallowed. That wet burn flashed through him again, igniting his eyes within the lamp’s glow and stinging his nose.

Stupid.

It was stupid.

“…We really won’t ever meet again?”

Death’s already soft, tender expression grew somehow sadder.

“No,” she said, “you won’t.” Her hand settled upon his arm, taking care to avoid his hand in favor of the crappy Halloween store bracer that was little better than cardboard. “I’m sorry.”

Hob let out a small, strangled huff of a laugh and pulled his arm back to his side. She let him go, and he ground his fingers into his eyes, furtively scrubbing away the lingering wetness there as his teeth bared.

“It’s funny,” he said in a way that wasn’t funny at all and stared listlessly into the dark. “I knew it was true, my dream. I knew it.” His hand lifted in a helpless gesture, going to grab hold of something and finding to his immense frustration that it was no longer there to reach. “Even now, when it comes back to me in these little pieces…like confetti…I know.” He once more rejoined her patient eyes. “But hearing it from you…”

His voice broke, and Death gave him that small, sad smile of understanding. He ran his hands over his face with a groan and shook his head as he cleared his throat and adjusted his tunic in quick turn. He stood slightly from the bench to straighten everything back out and swept a hand through his hair.

The struggle for normalcy, Death reflected. For motion in the face of eternal stillness, for confirmation that you were still breathing, still feeling, still capable of moving, when someone else was forever not.

For life.

She knew it well.

“So,” he said and turned now to face her in mirror, his own leg crooked atop the bench. “You were his sister.” His fingertips rested atop her knee. “Let me look at you.”

It was such a careful, earnest contact, and it carried through to his eyes as they stared and stared and stared, drinking her in as a lost man in the desert drank upon stumbling into an oasis. She leaned into the edge of the table and held that quietly desperate gaze, let him take her into his memory with every shred of concentration he could manage through the fog of bad alcohol.

Searching for some semblance of his Stranger, though they looked nothing alike.

And as his studious focus fractured into an emotional half-smile, radiant in the way a sunset was upon a final parting, eyes shining the same, she knew he had found it.

“Faith,” he exhaled in the face of her endlessness, breath hitching, “do I know you.”

She put her hand atop his wrist and briefly squeezed. She could see the rush of remembrance threatening to derail his focus entirely the longer he stared at her. It was time to remind him that she was not her brother but her own function. And as such, the two of them had a much different dynamic.

A far grimmer history and equally grim purpose for meeting now.

“I’ve passed you over a great many times, Robert,” she confirmed and let him pull back to lean in turn against the table with her. “And I’ve collected even more at your hand. At the end of your blades, your garrotes, your ropes, your bullets…” He had grown nervous once more as she spoke, and now he sat before her hardly breathing or blinking once again. Once more, he was the mouse before the snake; he just did not yet grasp that the snake was dead, and there sat an owl far above that was about to make a meal of them both on great wings.

“…beneath hooves, fists, boots, bludgeons….” She paused, giving him nowhere to run before her final words.

“Beneath the sea.”

Hob’s heart once again shattered, transfixed by her grave earth eyes. Her dark skin turned to a reaper’s cooled shadow in the blackest casts of the room, stayed warm and alive in the lantern’s glow.

His tears slipped over as he forced himself to hold her eyes, to not look away from this ugliest of truths. His breath came shakily. His chin trembled. When he spoke, he did so in a harsh, haunted voice bereft of begging or pleas for mercy. There was only dogged, overwhelmed conviction, the voice of a man who had lain awake for weeks, had lost years of sleep to this reflection, and arrived at only one deeply internalized answer.

It had been, is, and will be unforgivable.

“I could live for eternity,” he promised, “and never make up for that sin. For all my—” His teeth gritted; he took a deep breath. “But if I stopped living…”

Death arched an eyebrow as he trailed off.

“You really think you could balance all that you’ve done in six centuries?”

Hob shrugged, and there was not nearly as much defensiveness in the gesture as there had been two hundred-odd years prior.

“Don’t think that’s my call to make,” he said. “But I won’t find out if I quit on all this, will I? That’s a mug’s game.” The reflexive smirk that had sprung to his face at the phrase was forced this time, tired, and it stiffened like plaster in the sun, crumbling as quick to something bitter. His eyes casted to his hands. His fingers rubbed back and forth along the seams of his cup, flaunting the calluses of his long life but neither the scars nor the blood.

Death is a mug’s game.

He recalled the haughty gaze of a demon lord come to speak with him, so certain that Hob would have tired of eternity so swiftly. So disdainful of his humanity, so sure his will would turn out to be as fragile as wet tissue.

Hob’s lip twitched, almost but not quite curling into a sneer.

…Projecting much, Stranger?

“A coward’s game,” he finished. He took a drink. “Is that why you’re here?” he asked, pivoting the conversation again to Death. “Find out if that’s it—if I’m ready to call it a day? Am I right?”

She leveled him a stern look as his ire at the absent Endless landed once more on her.

“I’m here to talk,” she corrected in much the same manner. “I thought I owed it to you. Or to him, maybe.” Hob stayed quiet and allowed Death to reach over him for the tankard. She raised it to her lips but then paused there, watching him over the rim with a calculating eye. “You’d call my brother a coward?”

Hob shrugged again, this time not as sure of himself.

“Don’t know…” He dragged his finger through the condensation left on the dusty table until muddy patterns remained. Death took her drink. “S’pose I would. But not to his face,” he corrected with a flash of a smile that was torn between mirth and sadness. “Learned my lesson on that…” The sadness won out; the brief joy of old submerged again beneath the grief. “Though I guess that’s not something I have to worry about anymore, is it?”

In answer, Death handed him back the bottomless tankard and let him drink his fill.

In the Sunless Lands, Death paused. There was a fork in the path, that long, long path that everyone walked alone. She stood there at the crossroads, peering for something, listening for more.

…That way.

And that way she went.

“Death’s a funny thing,” Hob said, again without humor. He had turned to face the darkened hearth, too, staring into its years-old soot and ashes and the way the rain seeped down the stonework chimney to turn it to a cold sludge. “I used to think it was big, sudden, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off.” He scuffed his boot in the dust. It rose like faint smoke and dissipated just as quick. “I don’t anymore.”

Death waited for him to continue, pressed shoulder to shoulder. She thought of a towering pillar of stone and a black abyss beneath, a realm tearing apart around them and the sound of pigeons.

She thought of a pale, exhausted frame beside her, so thin she could count ribs, and eyes so sunken they looked like a skull’s.

“I think it’s a slow thing,” Hob said, still staring in the direction of the hearth but at nothing much in particular. “Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay.”

Dream?

…Take my hand.

“And then you lie down and shut up forever,” Hob finished. “Lots of little deaths until the last big one.”

Death smiled the smile that said she knew more than he and watched her human with the adoration of a god to their creation.

“It’s an idea I’ve heard before.”

He looked to her, brow raised. “And?”

She said nothing and only continued to smile.

In the What-Comes-Next, Death slowed to a stop and smiled sadly. She knelt and peered at the shade that shied from her beneath the path’s meager cover.

Hob rocked to his feet to approach the hearth, and once more Death beheld the restlessness of the living.

“And…suppose I do chuck it all in,” he began, bracing one hand against the mantle and scratching at the back of his neck with the other. “What happens then? You gonna tell me that?” He glanced to her over his shoulder but did not turn fully around. There was fear in his eyes, yearning and uncertain. “What is it?” he asked. “Heaven? Hell? Reincarnation? The happy hunting ground?” he joked with a fleeting, strained smile.

Death did not answer his needling.

His torturously playful expression struggled to hold the line, and he faced the mantle once more so she would not have to see it fail. He stared into the hearth, long-unlit and long-cold.

“Or just pain,” he mumbled, and the humid air deadened his voice until it passed into the gloom without so much as a fight. “And darkness. And then nothing at all….”

She watched his shoulders rise and fall with the carefully measured breaths of one trying very hard to not panic. She watched his palm shift ever so minutely along the stonework, seeking even now what sensation he could in the damp, old stones.

“What do you believe, Hob?” Death asked.

“Me?”

Hob hesitated but, in the end, forced himself to turn. His arms crossed over his chest, and he leaned against the mantle, taking as deep of a breath as he could and digging into the feeling of his lungs forcing themselves open against the dual-fronted vice of stone and his own grip. He pondered her question seriously, gave it a long, hard thought that he didn’t really need to grant it. He had been thinking about this a great deal over the last couple centuries and especially since January. But still, it seemed good practice to double-check that his philosophy had not changed in the last few minutes.

He was after all standing opposite the Angel of Death, or whatever name it was she used for herself.

“S’pose I’m with Old Kipling on this one,” he finally said. He let his head tip back to rest against the stone and imagined the cold pressed to his scalp spreading throughout his whole body. Forever.

“They will come back, come back again,” he recited gravely, “as long as the red Earth rolls. He never wasted a tree or a leaf. Why should he squander souls?”

Silence fell heavily. The rain’s tattoo reached a frenzy upon the roof as the downpour worsened, and here and there came the sound of fat drops plopping into dusty earth and atop old planks as the thatch above began to fail.

“Is that the truth of it?” he asked in that silence, regarding the not-woman opposite him. “Do we come back again?”

Death did not smile this time.

“You’ll find out, Hob.”

Hob’s heart did an odd sort of flutter at that, different than anything he had before felt: a heavy, pressing sort of pain that pulsed through his chest and up his throat and down his arm. It turned his stomach and filled him with a fleeting sensation of doom.

A warning.

An offering.

He crossed his arms tighter. Breathed as deeply as he could and tried not to start hyperventilating. He counted the stones pressing into his back and the smells that reached his nose. Straw. Dirt. Water. Beer. Horse shit. Sage. Leather. Ash.

Dust.

“So, is this it?” His voice trembled. “Game over? All done?”

“…Maybe.”

Hob tried not to laugh in a panic.

“And if it is?”

Death looked to the bench beside her and caressed with black nails the empty space where he had once been.

“Then, they’ll find you slumped over your beer.”

And in the heartbeats following her decree, Hob found he was angry.

It was a different angry than before, different than his petty disdain, more stifling than the petulance and the indignation, bone-melting in its heat.

Worst of all, it was wet.

“It’s funny,” he choked against his constricting throat—again, not funny, even less funny, no third-time’s-the-charm here—and again struck his hand across his face in a barely coordinated dash, fighting to keep that wet contained. “I always thought when I finally gave it all up, he’d still keep going, your brother.” He clamped his jaw down on the magma, on that storm surge, that hurricane that raged against the levees of his ribs. “He was so much older than me.”

Death’s eyes closed in a pitying flinch. He made his way in a trudge back to the bench and wearily sat down.

“So much smarter, too.”

So sure…so earnest. So hurt in his confusion, like a child trying to fathom that a loved one would never come home. To wrap his head around the impossible.

“But he gave it up,” Hob continued, jabbing a finger into the silent dark, and that same finger struck the bench beside him, punctuating each following word with a dull, heavy thud as the wet finally began to eat through. “And I’m. Still. Here.”

His voice almost fractured on that last syllable. But it held against the flood, not yet giving way—never yet giving way, like the body that carried it. Death’s eyes opened with a slow breath that brought them both back down to their dusty, darkened snow globe of a world. Hob sagged forward, elbows landing on his knees, and let his head and hands hang.

“He wasn’t the only constant thing in the world,” he admitted. He picked at his own fingers, feeling the calluses, mapping the scars that weren’t there but he knew by memory all the same. “But almost. And I liked him.”

Death debated her next words carefully. She hefted each in her hands as she considered them and then laid them into place until her response remained, perfectly assembled.

“My brother’s…sins, to take your word…rivaled yours, Hob Gadling,” she began. “He could be cruel, calloused. His pride,” she laughed in a bitter huff and stooped to mirror his posture. He watched her, dark eyes wide. “His pride has silenced universes, buried cities, murdered children, tortured innocents. Perhaps that’s why you never felt the need to justify yourself to him…or he to you.”

She latticed her fingers together. Her wrists crooked first one way and then the other, rocking her hands in a gentle sway.

Hob’s dams began to break.

“Then, how could he give up?” he demanded. The grief seeped through the fracture lines on the boiling waters, and his words began to disintegrate alongside the walls. “How could he say we weren’t—that we didn’t deserve the chance to—”

Death watched him stammer out and drop his head to his hands. The heels of his palms ground into his eyes, and his lungs forced themselves back into a deep, even rhythm.

“My brother always used disdain to hide a rather sensitive soul,” she explained after a time. “I think change was just too big a thing to face. I think he thought of it like your owl,” she knocked their shoulders together with a knowing little smile, “and not a series of choices.”

She swayed away from him…

“A little bit here…”

…and swayed back.

“…a little bit there.”

Their shoulders knocked a second time, and Hob’s entire body locked so tight the fissures whited out the glass.

“He was a fuckin’ coward!” The flashbulb anger burned out just as fast to hateful heartbreak. Those grave-dark eyes waited beside him; he could feel them, even as his shout lingered in the dark like a malicious echo, trapped in the damp that even now crowded his throat. “I could’ve—I would’ve shown—”

The wetness strangled him to silence. He ducked his head and knotted his hands into the back of his hair, finding the tangles and letting himself pull just to feel something. Anything but this, but that imminent shatter.

“I know,” Death said and spoke nothing more.

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